Yeah, Working for Rolling Stone Was Like That—But It Was Also Like This

If you’ve had an early peek at or read the recent press around Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s new and much-discussed biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, you’ll most likely get the impression that life at Rolling Stone was not like life at most other places of employment. That is, unless your company also had more than one in-house drug dealer, a freelancer who introduced himself by popping into the office wearing a bubble wig and drinking from a six-pack while jabbing himself in the stomach with a needle, and an owner–editor in chief who was smoking, snorting, and sleeping with both men and women—oh yeah, and the odd guest appearance from Jerry Lee Lewis, Stevie Nicks, Courtney Love, or Bono.

I didn’t start at the magazine until 1990—more than two decades after its origins in the San Francisco counterculture. The magazine’s section of drug paraphernalia reviews and advice, “Dope Pages,” was long gone, but there was still a particular, semi-secluded spot on the 20th floor of our offices on Fifth Avenue, across from Bergdorf’s, where you could hang out and wait for a weed dealer to show up. Small envelopes of cocaine were still occasionally doled out as thank-yous, and when I arrived at work one morning an hour or so late but red-eyed and jittery on a combination of Bloody Marys and pharmaceutical-quality cocaine after a 36-hour sleepless stint with Hunter S. Thompson, for whom I served variously as bodyguard, freelance muse, and drug dealer—or, as Jann put it rather more succinctly, “cabana boy”—I was patted on the back and told (with what seemed to be an admixture of sympathy and jealousy) to go home and sleep it off—but to be back ready to power through to the deadline the next morning. The flip side of this: The gauntlet of interviews I had endured—five, plus a typing test and a proofreading test—before I was granted my editorial assistant position was as grueling a test of intelligence, taste, and personality as I’ve had at any company to this day. Underneath all the seeming decadence was a bedrock policy: Have as much fun as you want—as long as you get the job done.

I was, of course, looking forward to Sticky Fingers, which Hagan spent four years putting together. As you may have heard, so was Jann—until Jann read the book, de-friended Hagan on Instagram (the Judas-like denial rendered in today’s social currency), and cried foul, calling Hagan’s book “deeply flawed and tawdry.”

There’s no question it’s tawdry. I’m not sure how anybody could have started what was essentially a hippie newsletter with a ragtag group of true believers and turned it into, variously, a countercultural bible, a cultural lodestar, and a commercial empire without getting their hands dirty. Yes, Jann really does seem to have double-crossed even his boyhood idol, John Lennon, to make a buck on a book, thus severing their relationship. No, Jann’s marriage to his now-ex-wife, Jane, was never really conventional, and his love life is frenetic and multivalent enough to make the rest of the world’s seem not only lazy, but unimaginative. Hagan wisely points out the two sides of Jann’s split personality: the seducer and the betrayer. (In one of those almost-too-perfect details, we learn that his mother named him after Janus, the two-faced god of transitions, passages, beginnings, and endings.) And as anyone who’s worked at all closely with Jann has experienced: The man giveth, and the man taketh away. As my old boss Hunter was (perhaps overly) fond of saying: Buy the ticket, take the ride.

There’s a peevish tone, though, that soon seeps into the DNA of the book. Here’s Jann in his office in San Francisco in the early ’70s: “Wenner’s never-ending letter writing, his tireless scheming, sounded like an act of violence echoing down the hallways, a rhythmic clacking of ambition and need.” There is, of course, another way of rendering this: Here was Jann, working his ass off. A few years later, as Hunter S. Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72 was about to be published, we learn that “Wenner publicized it as a seminal book of American political writing.” Left unsaid: That the rest of the world more or less agreed with Wenner. And while Hagan duly notes Rolling Stone’s high-water marks, from its all-hands-on-deck coverage of Altamont to scooping the world on the Patty Hearst kidnapping story to, 35 years later, forcing the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal, these passages can often seem more like due diligence amidst the rest of the book’s tone of decline and fall.

I can’t hold up Sticky Fingers to my own time working for Jann—essentially the ’90s, plus a couple later, shorter stints—to see how it’s rendered, though, as there’s virtually nothing from the magazine itself, or its staff, or Jann’s leadership written about this time period (there’s a brief mention of Kurt Cobain on the cover of RS wearing a T-shirt reading, Corporate Magazines Still Suck and dissing baby boomers, but no mention about the balls of a magazine editor actually printing this photo on the cover of their, yes, corporate magazine). Granted, Sticky Fingers is more a book about Jann Wenner than Rolling Stone per se, and the high drama of the ’90s is when Jann came out of the closet—an event Hagan covers with nuance.

Did Jann’s employees bitch about him? Of course they—sorry, we—did. It’s what you do: Complain about the boss. My own nadir with Jann (which is in the book): At his behest, I spent two years putting together an oral history of Hunter Thompson’s life, only for Jann to read the manuscript and like it so much he made himself my coauthor—with top billing. When I tried to argue my case to him, Jann casually waved his hand and told me it was just “a droit du seigneur thing”—referring, as one does, to the ancient right of kings to have sexual intercourse with the brides of his subjects on their wedding night.

Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour (center) with President Bill Clinton at the White House.

The other side of the coin—Janus’s other face, in this case—was this: Fifteen years earlier, Jann had sent me, barely out of college, on a mission to work with my teenage self’s hero, Hunter S. Thompson, telling me to simply meet him at the airport and “see what happens.” When my various missions with Hunter resulted in at least nominal success—he didn’t die on my watch, nor was he arrested—Jann rewarded me by bringing me along with him and Rolling Stone’s then-national affairs editor, William Greider, to the White House for an interview with President Clinton. After watching Mark Seliger execute a cover shoot on the South Lawn of the White House with about five minutes of access, during which a battery of Clinton’s aides tried to convince the president to leave for a NAFTA meeting (Clinton finally silenced them with a kind of Charlie McCarthy technique, not once breaking a smile in front of the camera as he said forcefully, but through clenched teeth, “As long as we’re here, let’s just do the fuckin’ photo shoot!!!”), we lunched in the private dining room off the Oval Office, and were soon treated to an explosive, red-faced, finger-jabbing temper tantrum from the president before he and his entourage stormed off, leaving us abandoned entirely. Jann, Greider, and myself found our way outside to a private patio outside the Oval Office, where we wordlessly lit up unfiltered Camel cigarettes and took in the view of Socks, the presidential cat, tied to a tree with a piece of string. Twenty-six years earlier, Jann had offered free roach clips to new subscribers to Rolling Stone and reveled in the opprobrium of straight society; now, having helped elect the first rock ’n’ roll president—who, of course, didn’t inhale—he’d endured a tongue-lashing from that same president about his responsibility as the leader of the liberal press. The tantrum, of course, was the perfect capstone to the story. Then Jann and I flew back to New York and got to work, on an almost impossible deadline.

The unspoken question I wish Sticky Fingers would have addressed: If, given the chance, all of us who’ve been wronged by Jann in various ways could have spent our time working somewhere other than Rolling Stone and for someone other than Jann, would we have done it? I’d be willing to bet a large sum of money that very, very few would have had it any other way—we’d just insist on a lot more up front (and in writing) the next time.